Desert Clarity
by Azilee
Summary: A glimpse into a body and a soul. A still moment of breathing clarity in the Sahara.
1. Desert Clarity

_**Hi all! This is very short and I don't usually read anything this short myself, but if you give it a minute you might be agreably surprised - I hope. I thought I might continue it one day, but it has been sitting on my computer for two months and it ends right, so for now it's a oneshot. Please share your thoughts if you can spare a minute.**_

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**Desert Clarity**

She is fading. She fades as she lies on the floor of that cell, so far away from where she was, where she should be. Ironic, really, how her place revealed itself to her, the placeless nomad, only when it was no longer hers. So now she lies, her back, her spread arms and her twisted legs soaking in the coolness of the cement floor, its chill spreading mercifully through her aching flesh, reaching her limbs and soothing the angry throbbing. She distances herself from the sore, insufferable wound she is, rises until she isn't a wound, until she just isn't. She lets her mind course out of her body, through the path the cool, merciful concrete has traced for her, and allows it to pulse out into the floor, into the inert material under her, into the painless non-existence of being there. She feels her strength there, pumping with unknown energy, free of what her body bears, is bore down by, is subject to. She can breathe through her broken ribs, revelling in the wonderful extinction her mind dwells in.

Her eyes are closed but she can see it all. The golden desert light flowing through the window, its harshness softened by the ending afternoon into a glorious garment of gentle peace. The splattered, uneven concrete walls, reminiscent of so many other bunkers, of other times in Normandy and the Sinai desert and Afghanistan and Iraq and so many places she doesn't need to think about to remember. The tired seven inch-thick door that creaks and groans but holds its own, the rust gnawing it raw and exposing its metal insides to the world. She seeps her soul into the ground, letting it trickle out of her aching body, oozing through every bruise, dripping out of every bleed, percolating her multi-coloured skin and soaking in the thick, protective, restrictive floor and she knows. She knows she will be alright.


	2. Apathy

**_A.N. This story wouldn't stay a one-shot and will instead be a collection of somewhat related, Ziva-focused, tiny snapshots. I hope you like it. I know I do, but telling me your opinion in a review would be greatly appreciated! And I don't own NCIS._**

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**Apathy**

She is numb. She is back in DC and she is numb. They came for her, rescued her, nursed her, and all she feels is apathy – a non-feeling. She gets up and walks through her life, every day; most days she can even jest with Tony, roll eyes with McGee and smile at Abby. Yet the feelings are as fleeting as fragile butterflies, their barely-there wings brushing oh so lightly off the edge of her consciousness, their un-sensed fluttering painful enough to nearly burst through her newly restored skin and the thin veil of lead indifference she bears. She knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt – and how doubts plague her! – what those innocent, praised, deceptively beautiful wings would bring should she let them fly, as surely as she knows that their colourful patterns and mesmerising shimmers are but ruses to lure fellow creatures and keep predators at bay. They carry memories too agonising to contemplate. They contain despair too cavernous to endure. They wear self-hatred too powerful to withstand.

She doesn't feel because she is scared of what those emotions, those separate, intimate pieces of herself, would do to her if she allowed them the space they clamour for, and she doesn't trust herself to keep surviving then. How many nights has she spent with her intricately built, medieval castle-thick walls up but with the loopholes open despite her best efforts to protect her core from her Unconscious' deadly arrows? Repeating, her own mantra, a prayer, an anchor and a burden:

"They saved me. They love me." Exhale. "They saved me. They love me." Force some bruising air back in.

She lashes onto these words, these two, simplistic, three one-syllable-words sentences. "They saved me. They love me." She holds on to their undeniable belief that she is worthy; of love, of risk, of life. Because those ever-flickering moths, they stain her soul with their powdery wings, they beat it and press on its aches and smother the light out of it. But they risked everything to rescue her and so she must live.

"They saved me. They love me."

Anchor and burden.

A good enough reason to make it through the next day – she hopes.


	3. Ana

_**AN: Those are cathartic one-shots so they'll be written as they come to me, not hurrying for a deadline. And, I'm happy with my life right now, so I don't know when the next chapter will appear. I hope these few lines touch you. If they do, please review!**_

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**Ana**

She stands in her kitchen, gazing at the yet to be opened can of tuna fish. She stared at the contents of the cupboard for ten minutes before reluctantly pulling it out with hesitant fingers. The rational part of her brain tells her in a sensible, no-nonsense voice to eat, that she is thin enough as she is, unattractively so, curveless, shapeless, unhealthily bony. She sighs. She knows that, of course, she isn't blind and her reflection in her bathroom mirror and in the tall bedroom mirror told her of her pointed bones and protruding ribs. They spoke of jutting elbows and sharp hipbones, of thinning flesh and dimming eyes. Yet she keeps on going, because of the other, much stronger voice in her mind. The voice that says she doesn't deserve it, the food, the well-being it brings, the ease its strength gives her body. She doesn't deserve to feel content, or beautiful, or strong. Maybe, just maybe, if she doesn't eat and continues to wane, she may disappear, slip into a bliss of inexistence.

She knows she has a lot to live for, that her life is easier than most's and that she is surrounded by people who love her. But knowing and feeling are two very different things, dissociated and antagonized, and she is too weak, too tired, too starved to keep her emotions from winning the tug and pull war her mind and her heart, her painfully twisting stomach and her constricted chest seemed to be fighting. So she puts the tuna fish tin back in the cupboard, trying to ignore the slight tremor in her fingers, and shakily leaves the kitchen to sink back into the couch.


	4. Homeland

**Homeland**

She stares sightlessly at the form before her, the spider scrawl of the printed prose sitting unregistered before her absent eyes. _Why do you wish to become an American citizen,_ it reads. She knows, because she deciphered the question over twelve minutes ago. Her thoughts are swirling in her mind like fugitive kites over Kabul. Now is not the time to think about Kabul. Smothering heat and suffocating burqas. Little boys playing football barefoot in tainted gold dirt with a deflated ball and children's unique sense of intense enthusiasm. Derelict, abandoned homes, their empty fountains filled with mud and vacant courtyards filled with dry, dead, exotic plants betraying a grandeur that once was and is no more, their inhabitants exiled or dead –killed. Turn a corner and the dark blue form is in the older part of Kabul, a myriad of mud houses baking in the smouldering sun and smothering silence of the midday heat. And then, the blood, its smell rendered rustier by the alley's dust and the _'For Israel'_ she murmurs as a ritual.

So much of her own blood has seeped into the soil of what she once called her homeland, linking her forever to her Tali whose scarlet life was absorbed in an absurd bloom by the dirt of a blown up café's sidewalk. It links her to her brothers in arms, those who died and those who haven't died yet, and to her mother who never bled but still lies surrounded by liquid souls in that forever burgundy soil. She has left so much of her soul there, a bigger piece every time she has fired a gun, thrown a life, strangled a cry and destroyed a man. A piece for each drop of blood, hers and the blood that might as well be hers for she claimed it and feels responsible for it.

She stares, fractured-souled and empty-veined and she signs. Because somewhere in all of that whirlwind of death and blood, of destruction and pride, of torture and loss, she has clung to a fragment of herself, unreasonably, instinctively and stubbornly, clutching that shard so hard that it cut into her flesh and bled into her palm: hope.


End file.
